Indian firm will do feasibility study on cross-border pipeline

M Azizur Rahman | Published: September 09, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

India's BPCL will do a feasibility study on an inter-country pipeline planned to carry petroleum from its Numaligarh refinery to oil-storage tanks in Bangladesh.
A senior official told the FE that a team from the Indian firm will be visiting Bangladesh soon to start the study work.
Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation (BPC) and the India's Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) have planned to build together the country's first oil-import pipeline.
Initially, 300,000 tonnes of refined petroleum products will be pumped in annually from BPCL's Numaligarh refinery.
Officials from the two state-owned companies have held discussions several times over the proposed pipeline and agreed in principle to go ahead with the project.
If everything goes well, BPC might start importing refined oil products from the Bharat Petroleum's refinery in India's northeastern Assam state within a few years.
The 3.0-million-tonne-a-year Numaligarh refinery, in which BPCL has a 61.5 percent stake, is located near Bangladesh's northeastern border.
The project envisions a 135-kilometre pipeline connecting the plant to BPC's oil depot at Parbatipur in Bangladesh's northern Dinajpur district.
The Parbatipur oil depot is one of the largest in Bangladesh, with a current storage capacity of 10,383 tonnes.
But the BPC official said the company plans to increase the oil-storage capacity by 15,000 tonnes to facilitate planned imports from BPCL.
Both BPC and BPCL have agreed to invest in the project, said sources.
"If successfully implemented, the pipeline is expected to reduce Bangladesh's oil-import cost and importing time both," said one official.
Transportation losses will also be cut down.
BPC, Bangladesh's sole petroleum importer, is planning to initially import about 300,000 tonnes of refined oil products every year from the refinery. The volume could potentially increase to 1.0 million tonnes per year within three to four years, said the BPC official.
BPC is keen to import mainly gasoil from the Numaligarh refinery to meet a mounting demand, especially to operate gasoil-run irrigation pumps.
But it will import other refined products as well, in line with domestic requirements.
The state corporation currently has term deals in place until December 2014 to import refined oil products from Kuwait Petroleum Corp; Petco, the trading arm of Malaysia's state-owned Petronas; the Philippine National Oil Company; Emirates National Oil Company; Egypt's Middle East Oil Refinery; the Maldives National Oil Company; state-owned PetroChina and Indonesia's Bumi Siak Pusako.
It also has deals in place to import crude oil from Saudi Aramco and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company until December 2014.
BPC also occasionally comes to the spot market to buy oil.
The Numaligarh refinery is operated by Numaligarh Refinery Limited, which is held by BPCL (61.5%), Oil India Limited (26%) and the government of Assam (12.35%).